The forum you are viewing relates to Kayako Classic. If you signed up or upgraded to the new Kayako (after the 4th July 2016), the information in this thread may not apply to you. You can visit the forums for the new Kayako here.

Jamie, you have to understand this from your customer's point of view. We all understand that you really want people to get off the kayako classic. You wanted it so bad that you were going to stop all support for it but then quickly realized how bad of an idea it was then backed out. Kayako classic has gotten mainly just bug fixes for years. There are major things that need to be corrected such as PHP 7 that don't take that long to complete but you have been stalling and it is clear why. Your new support options are priced astronomically higher than they previously were. So, here is the most likely thing that will happen.

Shortly after your last customers' paid updates from the old plan expires you'll suddenly have many new updates and features for kayako classic that you've been holding back for years. You've decided to do this because you see that many of your customers aren't actually moving over to your new support plans for kayako classic or moving to the new kayako and you're doing literally everything you can to get them to move over. Sadly though many of your customers such as ourselves see no value in paying massively more (in some cases 4x+ as much) for a product that isn't being improved upon or updated with anything other than bugfixes.

If you truly want to retain customers you should release these fixes and improvements ASAP because right now you're showing literally no value in upgrading to the more expensive plans. You don't need to give them everything in the new kayako, but at least make sure your classic is actually being supported and updated as it should be. With your current business plan you are going to lose a lot of customers to competitors simply due to your business practices and lack of product value. Releasing these updates after the fact will not see the massive boost you were hoping for it is simply another mistake just like announcing eol with classic last year. Very few businesses will be willing to pay your much higher price tag after the fact if you've already destroyed your product's image.

gatsu000 - I'm thinking the thing you'd like me to take away from that is "release more updates for Kayako Classic"? We're on it

Shortly after your last customers' paid updates from the old plan expires you'll suddenly have many new updates and features for kayako classic that you've been holding back for years.

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You can upgrade a legacy perpetual license to the new continued support plans at any point, so there isn't a timing issue per se.

You needn't have any concerns about the viability of the new continued support plans and what they mean for Kayako Classic: demand for them has been great, and the number of customers on the new continued support plans already far outstrips those with remaining support on their perpetual licenses (but, obviously, there's a mix of people who have upgraded with a view to moving to the new Kayako, and those who are staying with Kayako Classic). Knowing what we know now and the support we could have secured from existing customers for the Kayako Classic product, we'd never have put together an end-of-life plan!

As a test, I am trying to run Kayako 4.78.1 on PHP 7 (7.0.15). Things are going surprisingly well, with just 1 major issue so far. If you want to try out, here is what I did:

1. Edit __swift/library/Exception/class.SWIFT_Exception.php, line 166, changing E_STRICT for E_WARNING. This is because the error "Declaration of XXXX must be compatible with YYYY" previously was of type E_STRICT, but now is E_WARNING. We can safely ignore it (as in PHP 5).
2. Replace __swift/thirdparty/adodb5 with the latest stable version of ADOdb (5.20.9 as of this time). Additionally, you need to go to datadict directory (inside adodb5) and copy datadict-mysql.inc.php to datadict-mysqli.inc.php, while modifying mysql to mysqli (class name, $databaseType and you're done).

After this, I could make a clean install of Kayako and some very light testing here and there didn't reveal anything wrong. The only issue (more or less serious) I find is that if I go to the Staff or Admin CP like:

Admittedly, I haven't tested almost anything of Kayako and I know that sometimes things just seem to work, just to fail at some corners. But this offers a good hope for us who won't be able to renew support due to the increased prices, at least for some time.

With just a little longer than a year remaining on PHP 5.6 support (see: http://php.net/supported-versions.php ) one would expect some more work to move out of it. Yes, the new style looks great but, given the timeframe for PHP 5.6 retirement, it simply looks like the cheapest and easiest way of trying to convince people that there's still some value in a product that is clearly very low on your priority list.

it simply looks like the cheapest and easiest way of trying to convince people that there's still some value in a product that is clearly very low on your priority list.

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Low? This thread is nearly two years old now. To ignore a real need and instead push out a bit of window dressing speaks volumes about the attention being given to this. More and more I'm convinced the continuation of this version was to simply shut off the complaints about it being EOL'ed and let it die on it's own from onerous pricing and incredibly delayed updating. The few that remain on this, but at the new pricing, are basically subsidizing the SAAS version's development, since that's where all the attention is for Kayako.